http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
BRANKO PILISER describes his older brother Slobodan as a simple man of few
ambitions. His life’s goals were a job, a house and a family. For 20 years
he had all three, living quietly with his wife and two sons in a comfortable
apartment in the Ulpijana section of Pristina, Kosovo, and working for an
import-export company.

But on July 6th, days after NATO peacekeepers moved into his village, armed
men came to Slobodan’s door and told him to get himself and his family out
of the apartment and out of Kosovo.

Slobodan’s family is Jewish. But the militant Albanian nationalists of the
Kosovo Liberation Army have never distinguished among the province’s
non-Albanian, non-Muslim minority. The Pilisers were the last Jewish family
to be expelled from Pristina, a city which had only about three such
families to begin with.

Today, Slobodan’s family is homeless and without income. They are staying
with friends in central Serbia. Branko, who lives in San Diego, found out
only when he telephoned his brother’s apartment and a stranger answered,
speaking Albanian.

Slobodan’s simplicity was his downfall, says Branko.

"He was a good example of provincial mentality," Branko explains. "My
brother was never interested in seeing the world. He didn’t care about any
place but Kosovo. He was happy with his city, his street, his country and
his friends. And that is the tragedy. They’re kicking out people who got
along with others and never thought about leaving."

Yugoslavia’s Jewish community, which was a hundred thousand-strong in 1941,
was reduced to about ten thousand by 1945, ninety percent of them killed off
by Nazis and their Croat and Albanian collaborators. Of the ten thousand,
most moved to Israel while the rest stayed on. Very few opted to live in
Kosovo, which until recent months, had a total of 40 Jews living in it, most
of them in mixed marriages.

When Branko’s father moved his family to Pristina in 1960, just over half of
the city’s inhabitants were Albanian; about 40 percent were Serb; and the
rest a spattering of gypsies, Croats, Macedonians, Turks and Jews. That year
Marshall Tito’s government assigned several agricultural experts, among them
Branko’s father, to help cultivate underdeveloped areas like Kosovo. When
the family moved to Pristina, recalls Branko, cattle freely roamed its
central streets.

"It was like the Gaza of Europe--very undeveloped," says Branko. "But my
father loved it. His family died in Auschwitz, and more than anything he
needed to be around nature and to have people to teach, people to listen to
him. He was a born teacher."

Branko describes his childhood as "interesting." But unlike his brother, he
knew early on that he’d be making a life for himself outside of Kosovo.

"I was the one into Judaism and Zionism," says Branko, who was active in
Jewish community centers and traveled to Israel frequently. Then one day in
1983, at the age of 28, Branko quit his translating job near Belgrade and
set off for Israel again, this time leaving Kosovo permanently. Branko, now
44, eventually moved to America and settled in San Diego, where he met his
wife Mary. She is a professor at the state university, and he is an
accountant.

The 1960s were still the days of Communism in Eastern Europe, and strict law
and order ruled its regions. In Kosovo, this changed in the late ‘60s, when
Tito began granting increased autonomy to the province.

Almost immediately, a flood of illegal immigrants from Albania began pouring
into Kosovo. Gradually, Albanian became the official language at Kosovo
schools and at Pristina University; pharmacists stopped using the universal
Latin language for drug-labeling and started using Albanian; many shunned
Yugoslavia’s language and laws, often not paying their utility bills. An
unwritten second-class-citizen status was bestowed upon the non-Albanian
minority, particularly Serbs, but also Roma, Turks, Catholics and Slavic
Muslims.

For these people, medical care at Albanian-run hospitals was frequently
either denied or unsafe. Minority women often traveled to Serbia to give
birth, as Slobodan’s wife Snezana did when bearing their first son, Nemanja,
now 17. For Turks, burned cars and garages served as encouragement to either
flee to Turkey or to lie and call themselves Albanian, which was also the
way to get decent jobs.

"I had Turkish friends and neighbors where brother did not speak to
brother," continues Branko, "because one switched to calling himself
Albanian.

"Like any normal person would, I felt sympathy for the Serb and Turk
populations," says Branko who, neither a Serb nor an Albanian, considered
himself an impartial witness.

Alexander Dragnich, a retired professor of political science who served in
the American Embassy in Belgrade, has written several books on the Balkans
and is an expert.

"There was really an ethnic cleansing going on of Serbs being kicked out,"
says Dragnich. "Their haystacks were burned, their fruit trees chopped down,
their property stolen, all of which forced them to leave." He adds, "The
hope in giving [Albanian-ruled] Kosovo autonomy was that they would become
loyal citizens of Yugoslavia. But instead they used the increased privileges
to clean Kosovo of Serbs."

By the 1980s, second-class citizenship--abetted by the stream of
immigration--had evolved into organized terror, including rape most often of
Serb women, plundering of non-Albanian property, and killings of Serbs.

The situation took a turn for the worse in 1988, according to Dragnich, when
the Yugoslav government, a diverse body composed of Croats, Bosnians, Serbs,
Slovinians and others, attempted to stem such goings-on by reducing Kosovo’s
autonomy to what it had been in 1963.

"The Albanians wouldn’t stand for it," Dragnich asserts. "They began
boycotting all government institutions and clinics, and holding strikes.
They built up their own institutions, clinics, schools, homes and office
buildings."

With the 1990s came the birth of the KLA, which "engaged in the systematic
killing of state officials," according to Dragnich, "including Albanians who
made accommodations with the Serbs. The situation came to a head in 1997 and
’98, when it became essentially a low-key civil war."

Branko could have predicted the rise of Slobodan Milosevic. It was an
inevitability that growing up in Kosovo had prepared him for. Nor did the
past 10 years of extreme turmoil in the region come as a surprise.

But what Branko never expected was that his adopted country, the world’s
foremost democracy, situation far from Europe and its skirmishes, would take
sides in a Balkan civil war that would leave his brother homeless and
himself, an American citizen, powerless to help him.

For, despite his current circumstances and NATO’s role in bringing them
about, Slobodan Piliser is not a "refugee." That is a status the State
Department reserves for Albanian Muslims. Serbs, Jews, Turks, Roma and
Catholics ousted from their homes or still dodging shells fall under the
term "internally displaced persons," and such persons are not eligible for
sanctuary abroad.

"We’re not saying you have to be Albanian to be a refugee," a State
Department official insists. "Admittedly, the vast majority are Albanian. In
this particular case, the most relevant fact is that Slobodan Piliser is
still in his country of citizenship, under the protection of that country’s
government."

According to the official, unlike the tens of thousands of Albanians who
fled into Albania and Macedonia, Slobodan has not crossed any international
border and therefore is not a refugee.

But one need only think back a few months to recall that it was on behalf of
internally displaced Albanians taking refuge in the mountains of Kosovo that
NATO undertook an entire bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. In furtherance
of this initial policy, entry has been made available to 20,000 Albanian
Kosovars, who will also be eligible to sue the Yugoslavian government in
American courts.

"Twenty thousand Kosovo Albanians are being reunited with family in the
U.S.," Branko despairs. "Why not one Jew?

"I offered to sponsor my family," Branko says. "They wouldn’t even need the
$800 a month that the government gives to Albanian refugees here. Especially
in a democracy, there should be a way to help your family. Instead, my tax
dollars helped get my brother kicked out of his home."

Actually, a sponsoring relative can do little more than get a family member
onto an immigration waiting list. Slobodan has long been on one, as he was
approved for entry to the U.S. back in 1993, when Branko filed a petition on
his behalf. But according to Julie Wong, a spokesperson for California
Senator Barbara Boxer’s office — which took up the case with the Immigration
and Naturalization Service and State Department — the earliest date on which
Branko is likely to be admitted is 2003.

"We asked if any exceptions were being made for displaced Serbs or Jews,"
Wong reports, "and they said ‘No.’"

Branko calls it a "shameful, Aryan kind of approach," and asks, "Where were
the U.S. and NATO for the past 40 years, when more than half a million Serbs
were being killed or kicked out of Kosovo and out of Croatia?"

At least this "Aryan" approach is consistent with U.S. involvement on the
side of Albanians in the first place, who according to Dragnich have never
made any secret of wanting a purely Muslim-Albanian Kosovo. He says he is
not surprised by Slobodan Piliser’s story.

"The KLA has always wanted a clean, ethnic-Albanian Kosovo," he says.
"Nothing odd happened here. The militant Albanians are very intolerant of
anyone who is not Albanian."

In fact, the parallel runs deeper.When Germany overran Yugoslavia in 1941,
Kosovar Albanian nationalists considered the Wehrmacht’s soldiers
liberators. In 1944 the Waffen SS Skanderbeg division, named for an Albanian
military hero and composed of militant Albanians, was responsible for
killing half of Kosovo’s 550 Jews, along with thousands of Serbs and an
uncounted number of Gypsies.

That is why, given this record, Branko accuses organized American Jewry of
hypocrisy. "Elie Wiesel and other prominent Jews called for the bombing and
burning of Yugoslavia," he says. "But today we don’t hear their calls to
help the innocent victims of this tragic scenario."

Challenged on this point, Wiesel replied, "I will try to help Slobodan
Piliser as much as I can, as well as I can," and offered to use his contacts
"at the highest levels" in Yugoslavia.

Wiesel’s whole-hearted support for military intervention was seconded by the
Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman, as well as by other world Jewish
organizations, all of which are today actively involved in relief efforts
for Albanian refugees.

In their eager scramble to help Muslims, these Jews have tied their hands to
help their own. Nor do they voice an objection or lobby against the State
Department’s anti-Yugoslavia, anti-Serb policy which is unwavering despite
ongoing anti-Serb rampages and the Albanians’ turning on KFOR peacekeepers
and UN workers.

The apathy is especially out of place, given the parallels that abound
between the Jewish and Serbian experiences. During the second world war,
while the enemies of the Jews were doing their best to eliminate them, the
enemies of the Serbs took advantage of the Nazi occupation to expel and
slaughter the Serbs and snatch up some land in the process. Jews and Serbs
fought and died side by side in Serb resistance units. Others died together
at the Jasenovac death camp. Serbs hid, fed, housed and some even married
Jews they didn’t know in order to save these strangers from death camps.
This was rare among Nazi-occupied Eastern European countries.

Now that the world has targeted the Serbs, Branko says, Jews owe it to them
to look deeper.

"How does a Christian area become 90% Muslim?" he asks. "Villagers don’t
sell their lands. They don’t move. They leave out of fear and terror." He
adds that when Jewry’s most vocal members, many of whom built their careers
and foundations on commemoration of the Six Million, "join politicians in
making cheap Holocaust analogies at the expense of Serbs, they also expend
their Six Million. But I suppose it’s easier to see wrong already done than
wrong in the making.

"I’m not saying that people didn’t get hurt [by Serbs]," Branko continues.
"No nation is a nation of saints or criminals. Were there killings? Of
course, but the crimes were greatly exaggerated."

Indeed, the "hundreds of thousands" reported dead by the State Department
and White House before the NATO invasion now number just 2,000—including
both Albanians and Serbs. Likewise, as mass graves--and a mining shaft
thought to contain 700 Albanian bodies--turn up empty, the "thousands upon
thousands" of Albanians "purged" by Serbs during the NATO siege appear to be
closer to a few hundred.

Looking to war for the answer, Branko says, missed the mark. In Yugoslavia
it also destroyed most means of production, leaving the country 90%
unemployed. Winter is on its way, and much of Belgrade’s ecology,
infrastructure and economy is devastated from 11 weeks of bombing. The
ongoing embargoes—such as the recent U.S. rejection of Yugoslavia’s plea to
reinforce itself for the winter months—continues to miss the mark.

"If the U.S. had put just five percent into Kosovo life of what it put into
the war and destruction, there would not have been civil war," Branko
asserts. "Countries that have strong middle classes don’t have civil wars.
They may disagree, but everyone has too much to lose."

Today Slobodan has lost everything.

"It’s a shock for someone to lose what he’s worked for for 20 years," Branko
says. And yet, he considers his brother among the lucky.

Slobodan’s best friend, Bardy, was a Catholic Albanian married to a Serbian
woman. "He had just called me a few months ago," Branko reminisces, "because
he was so excited about his new dog--a Rottweiler, like so many in America
have. When the KLA came in with NATO, he was killed, just for not being a
‘good’ Albanian."

Another friend, a Serb named Ilija, died while an "internally displaced
person" in Serbia, from what Branko calls "sorrow and anger."

The Serb Ilija, the Albanian Bardy, and the Jew Slobodan were three best
friends who got married on the same day, alternately serving as one another’
s best man.

That his brother is still alive today is Branko’s only consolation. And for
that, this Jewish man is once again grateful to the people of
Serbia.

JWR contributor Julia Gorin is a journalist and stand-up comic residing in Manhattan. Send your comments to her by clicking here.